But if the magical-technological fitness and efficacy of women has led to the growth of institutions vesting the disposal of the produce in the women, in a more or less discretionary way, the like effect has been even more pronounced, comprehensive and lasting as regards the immaterial developments of the case. With great uniformity the evidence from the earlier peaceable agri-cultural civilisations runs to the effect that the primitive ritual of husbandry, chiefly of a magical character, is in the hands of the women and is made up of observances presumed to be particularly consonant with the phenomena of motherhood.58 And presently, when the more elaborate phases of these magical rites of husbandry come, by further superinduction of anthropomorphism, to grow into religious observances and mythological tenets, the greater daimones and divinities that emerge in the shuffle are women, and again it is the motherhood of women that is in evidence. The deities, great and small, are prevailingly females; and the great ones among them seem invariably to have set out with being mothers.
In the creation of female and maternal divinities the parental instinct has doubtless greatly re-enforced the drift of the instinct of workmanship in the same direction. The female deities have two main attributes or characteristics because of which they came to hold their high place; they are goddesses of fertility in one way or another, and they are mothers of the people. It is perhaps unnecessary to hold these two concomitant attributions apart, as many if not most of the great deities claim precedence on both grounds. But the lower orders of female divinities in the matriarchal scheme of things divine will much more commonly specialise in fertility of crops than in maternity of the people.
The number of divinities that have mainly or solely to do with fertility is greater than that of those which figure as mothers of the people, either locally or generally. And perhaps in the majority of cases there is some suggestive evidence that the great female deities have primarily been goddesses of fertility having to do with the growth of crops - and, usually in the second place, of animals - rather than primarily mothers of the tribe;59 which would suggest that their genesis and character is due to the canons of the sense of workmanship more than to the parental bent, although the latter seems to have had its part in shaping many of them if not all.
The female divinities belong characteristically to the early or simpler agricultural civilisation, and what has been said goes to argue that they stand on technological grounds in the main; indeed, in their genesis and early growth, they are in good part of the nature of technological expedients. They are at home with the female technology of early tillage especially, and perhaps only in the second place do they serve the magical and religious needs of peoples given mainly to breeding flocks and herds; although it is to be noted that most of the greater known goddesses of the ancient Western world, as well as many of the minor ones, are also found to be closely related to various of the domestic animals. In America and the Far East, of course, any connection with the domestication of animals would appear improbable.
With a change of base, from this early husbandry to a civilisation in which the main habitual interest is of another kind, and in which the habitual outlook of men is less closely limited by the same anthropomorphic conceptions, of nurture and growth, the goddesses begin to lose their preferential claim on men’s regard and fall into place as adjuncts or consorts of male divinities designed on other lines and built out of different materials and serving new ends.60 But the hegemony of the mother goddesses has unquestionably been very wide-reaching and very enduring, as it should be to answer to the extent in time and space of the civilisation of tillage as well as to its paramount importance in the life of mankind, and as it is shown to have been by the archaeological and ethnological evidence.
A further concomitant variation in the cultural scheme, associated with and presumably traceable to the same technological ground, is maternal descent, the counting of relationship primarily or solely in the female line. In the present state of the evidence on this head it would probably be too broad a proposition to say that the counting of relationship by the mother’s side is due wholly to preconceptions arising out of the technology of fertility and growth and that it so is remotely a creature of the instinct of workmanship; but it is at least equally probable that that ancient conceit must be abandoned according to which the system of maternal descent arises out of an habitual doubt of paternity. The mere obvious congruity of the cognatic system as contrasted with the agnatic, has presumably had as much to do with the matter as anything, and under the rule of the primitive technology of tillage and cattle-breeding this obvious congruity of the cognate relationship will have been very materially re-enforced by the current preconceptions regarding the preferential importance of the female line for the welfare of the household and the community. And so long as that technological era lasted, and until the more strenuous culture of predation and coercion came on and threw the male element in the community into the place of first consequence, maternal descent as well as the mother goddess appear to have held their own.
It will have been noticed that through all this argument runs the presumption that the culture which included the beginnings and early growth of tillage and cattle-breeding was substantially a peaceable culture. This presumption is somewhat at variance with the traditional view, particularly with the position taken as a matter of course by earlier students of ethnology in the nineteenth century. Still it is probably not subject to very serious question today. As the evidence has accumulated it has grown increasingly manifest that the ancient assumption of a primitive state of nature after the school of Hobbes cannot be accepted. The evidence from contemporary sources, as to the state of things in this respect among savages and many of the lower barbarians, points rather to peace than to war as the habitual situation, although this evidence is by no means unequivocal; besides which, the evidence from these contemporary lower cultures bears only equivocally on the point of first interest here, - viz., the antecedents of the Western cccivilisation. What is more to the point, though harder to get at in any definitive way, is the prehistory of this civilisation. Here the inquiry will perforce go on survivals and reminiscences and on the implications of known facts of antiquity as well as of certain features still extant in the current cultural scheme.
It seems antecedently improbable that the domestication of the crop plants and animals could have been effected at all except among peoples leading a passably peaceable, and presently a sedentary life. And the length of time required for what was achieved in remote antiquity in this respect speaks for the prevalence of (passably) peaceable conditions over intervals of time and space that overpass all convenient bounds of chronology and localisation. Evidence of maternal descent, maternal religious practices and maternal discretion in the disposal of goods meet the inquiry in ever increasing force as soon as it begins to penetrate back of the conventionally accepted dawn of history; and survivals and reminiscences of such institutions appear here and there within the historical period with increasing frequency the more painstaking the inquiry becomes. And that institutions of this character require a peaceable situation for their genesis as well as for their survival is not only antecedently probable on grounds of congruity, but it is evidenced by the way in which they incontinently decay and presently disappear wherever the cultural situation takes on a predatory character or develops a large-scale civilisation, with a coercive government, differentiation of classes - especially in the pecuniary respect - warlike ideals and ambitions, and a considerable accumulation of wealth.
Some further discussion of this early peaceable situation will necessarily come up in connection with the technological grounds of its disappearance at the transition to that predatory culture which has displaced it in all cases where an appreciably advanced phase of civilisation has been reached.
Chapter III.